Cooking Schools In Minneapolis

Seafood lovers, home cooks, and everyone looking to have a good time are invited to three days of cooking contests at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans today through Monday.

Saturday, Aug. 4 - Day 1, 11:45 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Twenty of America's top seafood chefs will compete in the 2007 Great American Seafood Cook-Off presented by the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board.

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We have ways of making you talk

FROM breakfast chats to late-night celebrity confessions, Australian television is awash with talk. It is the medium's most efficient way of filling the hours and most of it happens outside of what we have come to call the talk show. There are game shows, cooking programs, science demonstrations, travel documentaries, comedy panels, quizzes and late-night desk-and-sofa satires where politics is played for laughs. From Sunrise on Seven at 6am to Studio B with Shepard Smith Live on Fox News 23 hours later, TV talkers never shut up.

Even big shows that are ostensibly about things other than interviews are filled with chat. Dancing with the Stars, Thank God You're Here, Big Brother and Australian Idol all rely on people talking in encounters shaped by writers, producers and the interviewers, who can offer shoulders to cry on or be acute inquisitors.

There's nothing like a man in the kitchen

I'll always remember the guy who got away. Not because of his doe-brown eyes magnified through round glasses, which were cool even before Harry Potter. Not because he was a graduate of Brown and Columbia Business School and could make beautiful furniture by hand. And not because, as I found out years later reading about his wedding in The New York Times, he was sitting on a $100 million real estate fortune. No, what I'll always remember about him was the dinner he cooked on our third date.

It was a rainy, blustery March evening. In his perfect way, Jake (whose name has been changed to protect his "trade secrets") called mid-afternoon to suggest that we skip dinner at the latest hip restaurant and grab something at his place instead. I was smitten. (Had he served me frozen pizza and a Bud I would have thought him a culinary giant.) But since he had spent three months at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, the menu was creamy pea soup, sea bass with ginger and miso, perfectly charred asparagus, and a rhubarb-pear crumble for dessert.

Lancaster Headliners: Finalists are chosen

The results are in, and the top 12 Lancaster Headliners finalists have been chosen. More than 3,400 votes were cast in July on the Lancaster Headliners' Web site, and the talented teens are preparing themselves for the finale show.

The top Headliner will receive a digital résumé package from Mithik Media Group valued at $800; 10 hours of studio time from John's Sound Design Music Studios valued at $600; the opportunity to sing the National Anthem at a Lancaster Barnstormers game; ITS Model and Talent Management Representation; an entertainment seminar from ITS Model and Talent Management and pictures to appear in ITS Model and Talent Management's Talent catalog for a year.

FISD Poised To Okay Budget, Tax Rate Cut

Approval was expected today, Aug. 29, as Fredericksburg Independent School District trustees met at noon to adopt a budget for the upcoming school year and a tax rate for 2007-08 that is 29.22 cents lower than last year.

The tax rate of $1.1464 per $100 valuation, down from $1.4384, was expected to be accepted by trustees at a special meeting at the Central Administration Building, 234 Friendship Lane.At the same time, the trustees were to okay a $30.4 million budget for the school year that got underway Monday.The budget, on which trustees and school officials worked throughout the spring and summer, is up approximately four percent over last year, and the tax cut comes as a part of state-mandated property tax relief measures that reapportioned some of the tax burden to business owners.